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of John F. Kennedy’s Pulitzer Prize–winning Profiles in Courage, which featured anumber of congressional “representatives” who went against the desires or beliefs of their constituents.)
    One challenge for anyone who faces ostracism for displaying civil courage is that newly earned and demonstrated respect may come from groups that the individual has long been taught to despise and disregard. You lose (perhaps all) your old friends, but you do gain new ones, whose values you discover correspond to those that came to separate you from your former relationships. For example, Sibel Edmonds found that Federal Bureau of Investigation whistleblowers (including, initially, herself) were extremely uneasy at being applauded by, or even associated with, members of the American Civil Liberties Union. General Lee Butler, who denounced the nuclear weapons that he had previously been in charge of, found that he couldn’t lunch any more with other generals, but was acclaimed by antiwar and an-tinuclear crowds, whom he had previously found, at best, simplistic, wrongheaded, or unpatriotic. (He backed away from his public stand, though he didn’t repudiate it.)
    Still, the Ridenhour Prizes for journalistic courage and whistleblowing (presented by the Fertel Foundation and the Nation Institute) and Yoko Ono’s recent Courage Award to Julian Assange, are steps in the direction of honoring civil courage. They make potential whistleblowers or other insider dissenters aware, at least, that while they lose membership and respect from groups they have long belonged to and valued (and this sense of loss, including the loss of multiple personal friendships, may be long felt and never fully compensated for), they will not be outcasts from the larger society, and will even earn extreme respect from groups they themselves come to respect and value. In addition to high-profile awards, organizations like Edmonds’s National Security Whistleblowers Coalition and Ray McGov-ern’s Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity provide valuable reassurance of this.
    Observers have noted that the Iraq and Afghanistan wars have provided us with virtually no nationally known heroes for battlefield courage, though a number have earned high decorations. But Bradley Manning is a war hero from those conflicts whose name will ring for a long time—even, and perhaps especially, if he spends his life in prison.

    DANIEL ELLSBERG , the former American military analyst who in 1971 released the Pentagon Papers, a top-secret study of government decision-making during the Vietnam War, to the New York Times and other newspapers, is the author of three books: Papers on the War (1971), Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers (2002), and Risk, Ambiguity and Decision (2001). Since the end of the Vietnam War, he has been a lecturer, writer, and activist on the dangers of the nuclear era, wrongful US interventions, and the urgent need for patriotic whistleblowing. In 2006, the Right Livelihood Award Foundation awarded Ellsberg its prize, known as the “Alternative Nobel,” for “putting peace and truth first, at considerable personal risk, and dedicating his life to inspiring others to follow his example.”
    WHAT’S POSSIBLE? JOURNALISM THAT MATTERS
    Josh Wolf
    For two short days in Denver this past spring, I momentarily forgot that the news business is barreling down a collision course with democracy.
    At a journalism conference, ironically titled “Journalism Is Dead, Long Live Journalism,” about one hundred journalists huddled together in small groups to explore what journalism might look like over the next century. Although everyone in attendance was well aware of the industry’s uncertain prognosis, no one dwelled on what isn’t working. Instead, every participant at the conference was focused on what’s possible and on how to turn possibilities into reality.
    Since 2001, the